America: No Peace Beyond The Line
Developer/Publisher: Data Becker
Reviewed by KaCee on 4/17/01

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First Impressions:

I was concerned right off the bat that this game would be not just politically incorrect (which I can handle, depending on the degree), but actually racist. I also thought initially that the game was made in the US, and worried that it would take flag-waving to an unappealing level.

In looking up the game requirements for this review (which are not printed in the manual, nor are they on the web site), I learned that the game wasn't made in the US at all: Data Becker is actually a German company. This may explain some of the less-than-politically-correct elements. Not that Germans are less PC, but things that are known to be touchy issues in North America might not be part of the cultural interpretation of "Cowboys and Indians" elsewhere in the world.

Indeed, America is pretty much a game of Cowboys and Indians with Mexicans and outlaws thrown in for good measure. Set in the 1800s, it includes modified versions of battles such as Custer's Last Stand and the Alamo. It's not PC, but I found the racial elements to be in an area that was gray enough to make it hard to label "racist." Hot-button words like "redskin," "paleface," and "gringo" are used, both in game play and in the mission briefings. For example: "Go kill all the nasty lying palefaces;" "Let's hunt down the redskins;" "Don't trust the gringos," etc.). The word squaw is also used, which some people find offensive. Although the word has origins in several native languages, it came to be used as a derisive term for native women, taking on a meaning closer to that of an expletive for female genitalia. However, some native women have reclaimed the word with pride, so it may not be considered offensive any more. Nevertheless, it is definitely a potentially inflammatory word, and had the creators been North American they might have been sufficiently aware of that to avoid use of the term.

Looking deeper into the game, I noticed other potentially racist elements. For example, all of the outlaws (even Billy the Kid and Jesse James) have Mexican accents, even though the mission briefings are read in a Southern accent. The only black people in the entire game are outlaws. Granted, one wouldn't expect black natives, but not all Mexicans were Hispanic, and certainly not all US settlers were white. Natives are referred to as being unable to keep their hands off liquor. The US narrator frequently admits that he knows the land belongs to the Mexicans or the natives, but he doesn't care, "because we were young American men and believed the land belonged to whoever [sic] used it." He also uses the phrase "Might is right."

Are these elements racist? Hard to say, and I'm sure everyone will have a different opinion. It all irked me sufficiently that I wouldn't want to have paid money for this game, even if it had been a great game otherwise. (WomenGamers' staff sent me the game after they received it for review.)

The problem is that this is not a great game. It looks very much like Microsoft's Age of Empires, both in its characterization and in graphic detailing. But I've played the much older AoE, and America is a pretty poor substitute. It crawls and skips at crucial times. It has errors and requires a patch to even play properly. It has really annoying sound. The game controls are nothing short of pathetic.

While the flag-waving ended up not being as bad as I had feared, I ended up so frustrated with this game that, after playing out the native scenarios, I used cheats to go through the mission briefings because I just couldn't stand playing it any more. I played the other races just enough to get a feel for each one, and to look for problems.

Graphics:

The graphics look okay for most of the game. As I said before, they look a lot like Age of Empires. Unfortunately, the game can get quite annoying when your people stand clustered in a group (as they are wont to do), no matter how often you tell them to stand in formation. In fact, using formations is a major pain, because every time you click to move them, they reassemble. This means that during battles, they're busier wandering around in circles than actually fighting the guy that's shooting them to pieces.

When lots of units are standing around together, trying to select just one is very difficult. Trying to select a specific one can be impossible, especially if you're trying to select a person standing in the midst of many horses. And it doesn't always work to make the units move out of your way. Firstly, selecting the units you want to move out of the way can be just as hard. Secondly, even if you have no formation selected, units will often move of their own accord to stand where you've just cleared others. Add these problems to the expected mayhem of battle, and consider yourself dead.

The terrain is fairly standard for games of this kind. Although it is nice (and logical) that some units on foot can go through forests, this too has its problems. Not all forests can be passed through, and there's often little to distinguish which ones your units can traverse and which ones they can't. You may count on a forest beside your camp acting as a wall, just to be attacked through it. Likewise, you may try to send your units sneaking through a forest, only to watch them get halfway and then stop. And when they stop, they're stuck. You have to select them one by one, in the right order (which is difficult, as stated above), and wiggle them out. The game designers should have gone one way or the other with passable forests to avoid these issues.

The introductory and final movies for each scenario, as well as the introduction to the game, are rather poorly done compared to those found in other current games. They're of a quality I would have expected in the early to mid 1990s. They're grainy, movement is unnatural, figures are poorly drawn, and faces are missing for the most part. The people look like tin figures. For all of that, the movies don't show much, and are pretty much pointless.

Parents should be warned that although the game is rated E for everyone, and there is a low incidence of visible violence beyond little people that fall down and disappear when shot, the Outlaws' main building has two bodies hanging rather graphically from it. They swing back and forth constantly in their nooses, which is a bit distracting; I kept thinking something was sneaking up on me when the corner of my eye would catch moving figures.

Sound/Music:

While the music is okay (though fairly mundane), some of the other sounds of America are really annoying. If you're clicking on a lot of units (and remember, you have to do this constantly because you can never click the right one the first time!), you have to hear their same one-liners over and over again. Some of their little statements are grating on the ears, while others are just lame. I started to feel bad for my husband (who was in the same room), because the lines were repeated several hundred times an hour as I played. I'm not exaggerating.

Native swimmers make splash noises in the water, even though swimming is learned in the so-called "camouflage tent." Swimming is not very camouflaged at all, in fact. You can hear them coming from quite a distance away, and have your units pick them off before they reach the banks. This is all well and good in terms of strategy, but it's unfair: the computer enemy never uses the sound to know that you're coming. And if it's your own people swimming back and forth, such as someone fetching supplies, the electronic splash sound can get downright irritating. Oddly enough, canoes are quieter than swimmers!

The sound controls are pathetic. The only choices are music and sound; there is no option to turn down the one-liners while keeping alarms and such active. There's no option to turn either the music or the other sounds off; the best you can do is to just turn it down so you don't hear it. Unfortunately, that means it's still playing in the background, which is one of the reasons this game is such a memory pig. The music is in MP3 format, and takes a lot of memory to run. The controls themselves are frustrating: unlike most games, these "buttons" aren't buttons at all. Instead, the player must slide a bar back and forth to adjust and tweak the settings. It's a little thing, but it makes an already frustrating game feel even worse.

Gameplay:

As stated, America looks like AoE and other such games, however, it suffers drastically by comparison in game play. It is typical of the genre in that the player must construct buildings, which in turn produce specific units or technology. As more technology is discovered, more buildings can be constructed, and units become more powerful. People who have played other games of this type will find America very easy and quick to learn. It also has the nice feature of letting you know when fields are harvested, so you can build new ones and keep the food supply constant (although the same does not apply for distilleries, and Outlaws use liquor as food). In spite of such minor niceties, actually moving units around to do things or even just trying to load a game is painfully difficult.

The music controls aren't the only badly designed elements of the interface. The entire game setup is non-intuitive. Where there should be a scroll bar on the list of saved games, instead there are two arrows for up and down. These do not work by holding them down; you must click once for every saved game below the first ones shown on the list. Since I have lots of saved games when I do reviews (to enable going back for screen shots), this made both saving and loading games extremely frustrating. My wrist actually hurt worse from click-click-clicking my way down that list than it did from playing the game!

The saved game order is also poorly designed. It appears to be using slots, so when you delete games and then save new ones, the saved games are in a weird order. To illustrate, let's say I had ten saved games and I numbered them 1-1 to 1-10. Then let's say I started the second scenario, and saved games numbered 2-1 and 2-2. Then say I deleted games 1-1 through 1-4, then played more of the second scenario, and saved games 2-3 through 2-10. The list would look like this:

2-3
2-4
2-5
2-6
1-5
1-6
1-7
1-8
1-9
1-10
2-1
2-2
2-7
2-8
2-9
2-10

The disorder multiplies with the additional saved games for each different scenario, and scenarios can be quite long. Now try to find one saved game, and remember, there's no scroll bar. This irritated me to no end!

The introductory screens are illogically ordered. Players have to navigate through several screens to load a game instead of just having that control located on the player selection page. Trying to back up through the screens jumps around in a different order than going forward, making it confusing at times. Also, there is no option to quit during game play; you either have to surrender and go through the score screen, which is slow to load, or you have to pretend you're going to load a game and then actually quit through that window.

The control panels at the bottom of the screen obscure too much of the screen during game play, and in one instance one of my cows got trapped beyond the scrolling point. Because there is no option to remove or minimize the controls, I had to sit and wait for the beast to come back out just to select it and move it elsewhere. Also, the map's scrolling speed was too fast for my liking. I don't like to have the screen scroll too quickly, because it makes me dizzy. It also makes it hard for me to go where I want. I typically set games to a fairly slow scroll. The slowest scroll speed in America was still much too fast, and I found it made the game more annoying.

As for the actual game, the scenarios themselves are quite well done, although the computer enemies are as clueless as in any of these strategy games. In other words, they will sit at one end of their camp while you burn the other end to the ground, they won't use horses left in their village when your people die, and so on.

The scenarios have plot twists and multiple challenges in each one. They start easy, but progress to being very difficult. In that regard, the game is a substantial improvement over older strategy titles, and I was excited about playing some of the scenarios. They do have the typical non-building scenario crop up from time-to-time, where you have to navigate a small band of soldiers through a maze of deadly obstacles and try not to die. I loathe such scenarios in these types of games. The one for the Natives is so hard that I couldn't do it, and I wasn't alone: the web site's forum has plenty of complaints about that scenario, and few people claim to have successfully completed it.

Unfortunately despite most scenarios being interesting, the game runs so abysmally that I couldn't take it after a while. Most notably, it runs very slowly and skips frequently during any battle; it gets worse if the battle involves many units. It's hard enough to control your units with their aforementioned selection and navigation problems. Now add in the fact that the graphics are skipping, the sound is jumbled and skipping, and it alternates between crawling and fast speed, and forget about battle strategy! This means the only realistic way to win is to have a bigger army than the other guy, which negates the nicely complex story lines.

I wondered if it was just that my computer was too slow, but I couldn't find the game requirements on the web site. The forum, however, was full of people complaining about the same skipping problems. I did eventually find the requirements elsewhere, and my machine satisfies them: I'm playing on a Pentium II 350 MHz with 64 MB of RAM. However, it recommends a whopping 128 MB of RAM! No wonder it is slow and skips on so many people's machines; that's a ridiculous requirement for this type of game. Age of Empires, a comparable game with many more types of units and a significantly better interface, requires only a Pentium 90 with 16 MB of RAM.

America is also a memory hog in terms of hard drive space. The publisher recommends 650 MB for installation, which pretty much means the whole CD-ROM will be copied. Of course, you still need it in to play because they don't trust you to have purchased the game! I wondered why it took forever for games to save and load, so I looked at the saved files, and they range in size from over half a megabyte to almost 1.5 MB in some cases! They must be saving the entire game instead of just unit placements and other necessary data. It can take up to five minutes to load a new game from the time you decide to do it until the game actually runs, including clicking time as mentioned above.

If the CD is taken out of the drive and put back in later, the autoplay doesn't bring up a screen offering choices of installation or playing, as most games do. Instead, it tries immediately to run setup and reinstall the game! This is very annoying, to say the least.

Another unnecessary element is that between all new games and between loads of saved games, the screen goes bright white. This can be painful to the eyes if you're playing in a dark room. It serves no purpose, but annoyed the heck out of me.

I played the game for a short time before it started crashing every time I had lots of units. I went to the web site, and sure enough, there's a patch for this problem. Expect to download this patch before you even begin playing. Even after installing the patch, America crashed massively and couldn't recover from it: after rebooting the computer, this crash left the game unable to access any of the saved game files; when I would click on "Load Game," it would just crash again. I had to reinstall the entire game, including the patch.

Before reinstalling, I moved the saved games to a temporary folder, then put them back. America requires you to play the Natives, Mexicans, Outlaws, and the US sequentially. By "the US," it means settlers, because apparently Data Becker, the German developer/publisher, thinks only white settlers qualify as Americans. Although I was able to load the last game and play it through, the game still believed I hadn't played any of the scenarios, and the scenario selection box gave me an error message. I had to use the "win scenario" cheat to catch back up to where I was before the reinstall. (For those experiencing the same problem, the cheat consists of pressing enter to open the chat box, typing "icanwineverythingnow" into the chat box and waiting for it to slowly appear since this is another crawling element of the game, then pressing enter again.)

Enjoyment:

In so many ways, this is a poorly constructed game. The one good point of innovative plot lines is completely destroyed by the poor playability: I've included screen shots that I hope will demonstrate how chaotic troop movement and battles can be. In particular, notice that in the shot of the battle between the Mexicans (green) and the Natives (red), it's hard to tell which horse belongs to whom, where the people without horses are standing (they're in there!), etc. Now imagine this actually moving, but skipping constantly; it's pretty much impossible to perform any kind of strategic battle under these conditions.

The picture of the dialog using the word "redskin" was taken during play, when the game took over to let me in on a distant conversation. This is why the control panel says "Training Tepee" even though you can't see one there: it froze what I was doing, then moved the screen to where the US was gathering their forces.

I wouldn't spend a dime on this game, as there are so many others of this genre on the market that are older, run better on older machines, and are better designed throughout.

Multiplayer:

This game has multiplayer options, but I had no way to test this feature. The manual says the game can have up to eight players over a local TCP/IP connection. It offers a few different win modes, but appears to just be a standard beginning where everyone builds up, then smashes each other.

Overall Impression:

This is a badly made game, based on a questionable theme. Given that other similar games from the past run better, with fewer errors and interface problems, I'd have to say that Data Becker has done an inadequate job overall. I'd encourage readers to pass on America, and go buy an undoubtedly cheaper copy of Age of Empires or Warcraft instead.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

Women aren't portrayed very favorably in America for the most part. Native, Mexican, and US women grow food and can also chop wood. Native women are actually quite useful characters, since they do all of the building and can defend themselves when attacked. Mexican and US women do not build things, and cannot defend themselves when attacked. Instead, they stand there and get shot. There are no Outlaw women, which I'm sure is news to Calamity Jane and her counterparts. Outlaws don't eat food; they live on liquor instead, unless they take over a settler town, in which case they can make the women work for them to grow food. Nuns and nurses, all of whom are women, can heal for Mexicans and Settlers respectively. They cannot defend themselves, either.

The narrators for the mission briefings mostly speak to you as though you are male, by calling you "my son" and similar things.

Links of Interest:

Get the patch here.